


kiss my eyes and lay me to sleep

by voxofthevoid



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst With A Twisted Ending, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Canon-Typical Violence, Consensual Sex, Dubious Consent, Face Slapping, Fifty Shades of Consent, Identity Issues, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Captain America: The First Avenger Compliant, Nothing is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Rough Sex, Unhealthy Relationships, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, Winter Soldier Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:47:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22619599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voxofthevoid/pseuds/voxofthevoid
Summary: The memories trickle in. Never a whole picture. Puzzle pieces with half the edges missing.Tampere brings war. Gunfire. A grinning man with plump cheeks hidden under a monstrous mustache. A woman whose mouth is redder than blood. A smiling man in round spectacles, needle in hand and death in his eyes. A faceless, nameless someone’s fingers warm around his own cold ones.Five days in Managua are spent barely leaving his hotel room as his mind reconstructs, with brutal clarity, the streets and shops of Brooklyn. Images without context. Dark cinemas and grey mornings and the knobs of someone’s spine under his fingers. Snapshots from a life he never lived, not this confused creature who clawed his way out of the charred remains of Sergeant James Barnes and drowned the last of the Winter Soldier in the Potomac.They come and they go, the ghosts. Bucky grows familiar with them without ever truly knowing them.In Bucharest, Bucky remembershim.The Captain.-Bucky is not the only Winter Soldier.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 100
Kudos: 456





	kiss my eyes and lay me to sleep

**Author's Note:**

> A while back, an anon recced a YouTuber’s stucky videos to me. [This glorious piece](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdrPrT4pWYQ) was the first one I clicked. Inspiration kinda punched me in the face, and this was born. This fic doesn't follow the narrative presented the video, but the tone - and one specific scene, you'll know which one - is heavily influenced by it.
> 
> Now, **read those tags**. Noncon, dubcon, and consensual sex are all tagged, and they all apply. And it's not just the sexual elements - this is darkfic and while the ending isn’t tragic in the usual sense of it, it’s pretty fucked up.
> 
> You can find [my tumblr here](https://voxofthevoid.tumblr.com/) \- feel free to ask questions about the content, triggers and the sort.

Seventy years of brainwashing doesn’t leave a brain undamaged, serum or no serum.

It takes a year for the Soldier’s memories to start returning. He remembers his sister before he remembers his own name. She’s just a face at first. The connections come later, on a night he spends muffling screams into a pillow because the sounds cannot leave the room.

His name emerges from the fog on his second week of blending into the tourist crowds of Matsuyama. He’s Bucky before he’s James or Barnes. There’s a voice too, young, childlike, shaping the syllables, but there’s no face to go with it. It’s not the sister. He knows that much.

Everything else trickles in. Never a whole picture. Puzzle pieces with half the edges missing.

Tampere brings war. Gunfire. A grinning man with plump cheeks hidden under a monstrous mustache. A woman whose mouth is redder than blood. A smiling man in round spectacles, needle in hand and death in his eyes. A faceless, nameless someone’s fingers warm around his own cold ones.

Five days in Managua are spent barely leaving his hotel room as his mind reconstructs, with brutal clarity, the streets and shops of Brooklyn. Images without context. Dark cinemas and grey mornings and the knobs of someone’s spine under his fingers. Snapshots from a life he never lived, not this confused creature who clawed his way out of the charred remains of Sergeant James Barnes and drowned the last of the Winter Soldier in the Potomac.

They come and they go, the ghosts. Bucky grows familiar with them without ever truly knowing them. 

And between everything, _in_ everything, there are memories of the lives he took while Hydra’s tentacles clung to his mind.

The one true constant is the fear. His own fear. The fear of his victims. The fear of the Avengers as they corner of him. Stark’s fear tinging his rage. The Widow’s fear as she runs at him.

It’s bad enough, hopping from country to country and continent to continent as his mind tears itself apart. It’s infinitely worse to do the same while the Avengers try to bring their combined might down on him.

But he survives each time. That’s what he became in the end. He knows no better.

In Bucharest, Bucky remembers _him_.

-

The Captain comes first.

-

The mission’s over. They have to report.

The Captain has other priorities. He always does.

The Soldier grunts as he’s entered. When they fight – when the handlers make them fight – he makes no sound. The Captain breaks his bones, cuts furrows in his flesh, holds him face-down in murky water, and the Soldier says not a word. The Captain is the same, weathering metal slamming into his ribs and knives sinking into his flesh with the same half-smile and cold, dead eyes.

This is different. This is always different.

“We’re wasting time,” the Soldier says, as he sometimes does.

The Captain backhands him. The Soldier licks the blood of his lips and catalogues the Captain’s throaty groan as the Soldier clenches around him. Fingers grasp his chin and make him face the Captain. His eyes are still dead, but his body burns where it’s inside the Soldier.

It hurts when he pulls out, but the Soldier doesn’t try to flee, doesn’t resist when the Captain flips him over with little effort. He’s the only one who can. His strength matches the Soldier’s; that’s why he’s the one who punishes the Soldier, when he has earned punishment. It goes both ways.

But this isn’t punishment. It’s pleasure. Messy and unnecessary. The Soldier isn’t sure he wants it, he never is, but the Captain takes it from his body and gives it to him with rough strokes of his cock and a too-tight fist, and the Soldier gasps with it, turning his head so the pillow won’t muffle his noises, letting wordless pleas flutter in the open air. 

The Captain’s teeth sink into his nape, where the Soldier’s hair will hide it until it heals. Skin breaks, blood trickling down the side of his throat, and a wet tongue laps it up.

The Soldier breaks with a shuddering cry, pulsing hot in the Captain’s hand. The cock inside him plunders on, forcing the Soldier’s clenching muscles to make room for its searing heat. The Soldier knows better than to beg, and he doesn’t want to fight. He lies there, closes his eyes, and listens to the Captain’s breathing grow ragged, sharpening right before heat fills the Soldier.

The Captain withdraws, and his semen drips out of the Soldier. A thumb drags through the mess, calloused skin pressing roughly against the Soldier’s swollen hole. He makes a soft, uncomfortable sound when the tip slips inside, tugging at the edges like the Captain is testing whether the Soldier is open enough from his cock. It slides out, and the emptiness is as odd as the fullness for those first few, brutal minutes.

The Soldier’s body will get used to it. It will get used to anything. 

The Captain lies down behind him. They’re unarmed but not undressed, the Soldier’s pants pulled down to his knees and only the Captain’s cock exposed. Their clothing is bulky, armored and meant to house weapons. It does not make the tight press of their bodies a comfortable experience, but the Captain is intent, pulling the Soldier’s back against his chest and tucking the Soldier’s head under his chin.

“We’re wasting time,” the Soldier says, softer than before, and he’s not forced quiet this time.

“We have enough,” the Captain says.

“Enough for what?”

They’re speaking English. The mission involved French. Their orders came, as always, in Russian. English has no place here, but it’s what they always speak when this happens. The Soldier remembers at least five times this has happened. It is entirely possible that he has forgotten twice that. He would never know.

“Enough to remind you who you belong to,” the Captain says, tongue suddenly sliding over the wound his teeth made. It’s healing, but it twinges at the wet warmth. “You’re mine.”

The Soldier is Hydra’s. So is the Captain.

Strong fingers wrap around the Soldier’s throat, the grip deceptively gentle.

“Say it,” the Captain commands.

“Yes, sir,” the Soldier says. He’s drowsy, chin tilted down over the Captain’s hand without much regard for its crushing strength. “I’m yours.”

-

The Widow breaks into his apartment, and Bucky quietly resigns himself to leaving Romania. He liked it here but then, he knows better than to get attached.

Case in point, the woman standing before him; her face is that of an adult, but Bucky sees a teenager in his mind, a fierce slip of a girl with flaming red hair and eyes that never lost their spark no matter how many times he and the Captain beat her down. Romanoff – Romanova then – was the best of the Widows, and now she’s the only one.

“Do you know me?” she asks in Russian.

“I did try to kill you once or twice,” he says in English. She knows better than to let her expression change, so Bucky can’t see whether she’s disappointed. He can’t imagine why she would be, but he still softly adds, “Natalia.”

She doesn’t put her gun away, but she does lower her arm.

“James,” she greets. “How much do you remember?”

“Not enough,” he says. “Are you here to kill me?”

Her mouth quirks at the corners, the color of her lips a duller red than that of the brown-haired woman from the war.

“If I were, you wouldn’t see me coming.”

“You and your…friends aren’t subtle. Should I expect the whole party?”

She shrugs.

“I sent Tony and Sam on a wild goose chase in Nicaragua. It won’t keep them long, but it should buy you enough time to get out of here.”

Bucky takes a moment to process that. Everything she has said is simple enough. It’s all the implications that rob him of speech for a few seconds, each of which he spends pinned by her sharp regard.

“Why?” he asks in the end.

“You’re not the Winter Soldier,” she says immediately, as if she was expecting the question.

“I assure you I am the man who threw you out of a burning Helicarrier and tore the wings off your friend.” He hesitates but eventually adds, “And killed Tony Stark’s parents.”

Her expression darkens, but it’s not anger that blazes in her narrowed eyes.

“I know. But that’s not what I meant and you know it, James.”

“Your friends aren’t as forgiving.”

“They don’t know what it’s like to have your self broken and reshaped a hundred times over. I can’t make them understand any more than you can.”

Bucky inclines his head. Fair enough.

“Why are you really here?”

She shrugs again, feigning a carelessness he doubts she’s even capable of feeling. He knows he’s not.

“I wanted to see for myself, I guess. Had an inkling from the way you fought us. No killing intent, just self-preservation. The Soldier was a weapon. He would have slaughtered us, not buy time so he could run. You’re different, James.”

“I prefer Bucky,” he ventures after a pause.

She nods.

“You should go.”

He skirts around her to get to his notebook and the bag stashed under the floorboards. Her eyes follow him, but her gun doesn’t, and though she knows she can put every one of those bullets in him in the time it would take him to rush her, he’s pleased all the same. They can kill each other within seconds in this ratty, one-room apartment, but the conscious choice not to is what makes the difference.

Choices matter, Bucky has been learning. Having a choice matters.

He stops with one foot on the windowsill.

“You know who I am,” he says. “Who was he?”

Her silence is more telling than the question she eventually asks.

“Who was who?”

“The Captain.”

“Ah,” she sighs, unsurprised. “You don’t want to pull on that thread, Bucky Barnes.”

She shows herself out the door without another word. Bucky leaps out the window with her warning ringing in his ear.

-

He almost listens to her.

He doesn’t know what happened to the Captain. He didn’t accompany the Soldier into America, that much he remembers. Karpov liked to keep his cards close to his chest and had a peculiar obsession with the Captain. True believer or not, he wouldn’t have let the Americans have him no matter how desperate the situation. He must have stayed behind, locked in a cryo chamber in some isolated facility. The thought sends a chill down Bucky’s spine, memories of ice and terror.

Bucky hasn’t sought out any information yet, not even about himself, at first because he didn’t know where to begin and survival was the greater priority anyway. Once he remembered enough to know where to start, he simply didn’t care to. He still doesn’t, content to lie low and let his broken mind join its jagged edges together into something that doesn’t quite fit right.

The Captain is not that great a priority. He was one among the many faces of Hydra, only different in that he was like Bucky, his mind wiped clean and twisted to serve the whims of their masters. But he was brutal too, as strong as Bucky, maybe stronger, and less compliant, treating the mission parameters more as friendly suggestion than absolute orders.

Obsessive too, turning his golden gleam on Bucky without any regard to whether it would burn him to the bone.

He was the closest Bucky had to a partner in all his years with Hydra, but Bucky can live without knowing who he is.

And then he remembers Steve.

-

The bark is rough under his hands, against the soft skin of his cheeks, but Bucky doesn’t struggle against the body pinning him to the tree, giving in without even a whisper of resistance to Steve’s hands and his heat.

That doesn’t mean he keeps his mouth shut.

“I want that kid who couldn’t get it up twice a day back,” he grumbles even as he bares his throat for Steve’s mouth. “You’re a fuckin’ menace, can’t go three hours without trying to stick it in me. My asshole hasn’t stopped hurting in a week, you crazy bastard.”

Steve has the audacity to laugh.

“Want me to kiss it better?” he offers, mouth curved into a smile against Bucky’s neck. Goosebumps burst across his skin, and Steve’s hand sliding around his waist to cup his crotch turns them into sparks of heat. “Huh, look at that. Gaggin’ for it but playing coy. What do I do with you, Buck?”

“Fuck you,” Bucky says, not proud of the shakiness in his voice.

“Mm, that’s the idea.”

Bucky lets his forehead thump against the tree, once, twice, before fingers slide into his hair and yank his head back, because Steve only likes Bucky hurting when Steve’s doing the hurting, and that hasn’t changed with the serum. That five-foot-nothing spitfire liked to make Bucky cry just as much as this walking erection in red, white, and blue.

Steve gets both their pants down to their ankles within seconds. Practice does that to you. Bucky just stands there and lets him do the work, because he’s owed that at least.

“I can hear you complaining in that big head of yours,” Steve says, warm and amused, voice in direct contrast to the perfunctory way he’s stretching Bucky open, not that he needs much. He feels open all the time, and it’s so _empty_ when Steve’s not in him, and yeah, okay, maybe he is almost as bad as Steve, but only almost.

“Hurry up and put in in me, Rogers. Before somebody finds us and we get blue-carded.”

“They’re not gonna do that to Captain fucking America,” Steve says, a sharp edge to the words that might sound proud in someone else’s mouth but just seems mocking coming out of Steve. Bucky never knows whether to be relieved or just sad that Steve shares his sentiments on what he has become.

“I ain’t Captain America, pal,” Bucky says, gentler than he usually would, turning his head to pull Steve into a clumsy kiss.

“You’re mine,” Steve murmurs against Bucky’s mouth, breath falling hot on his skin. “Ain’t nothing without my Sergeant.”

It’s as possessive as it’s reverent, and Bucky melts, body and heart putty in Steve’s hungry grasp.

“You like that?” Steve asks, cockhead at Bucky’s rim, a teasing pressure. “Being mine?”

“You know I do. Always have.”

Steve hums, pleased, but he doesn’t fucking go _in_ , still teasing. Bucky growls and tilts his hips back, taking Steve into himself, gasping at the stretch. Stamina isn’t the only thing the serum added.

Steve grunts and buries himself to the hilt, pinning Bucky to the tree with his cock, with his whole damn body.

“I know. They all know.”

“W-what?”

Steve starts fucking him, and Bucky forgets his question at the surge of heat and stabbing pleasure. He writhes and whimpers, grinding weakly against the hand Steve’s got on his dick and back onto Steve, letting himself be split open over and over and over until he’d mad with it, reduced to the searing sensation of Steve moving inside him.

“That you’re mine,” Steve says on the tail-end of a savage thrust that has Bucky seeing stars.

The meaning doesn’t penetrate, not until a little later, when Steve’s slowed into the desperate, grinding motions that say he’s close. And Bucky moans, choking on the sound, on Steve’s cock buried so deep that he can taste it in his throat, and Steve, so attuned to Bucky that it’s eerily close to mind-reading, grins with bared teeth against Bucky’s sweaty neck.

“S’true,” he says. “Anyone could take one fuckin’ look at you and tell, sweetheart.”

Teeth sink into his flesh, and Bucky comes with a whine, the whole of him throbbing like the bruise Steve is sucking to life. Steve groans, hand moving sloppily over Bucky’s cock, milking it through every pulsing wave of his orgasm and right into the other side where each touch of his newly calloused hand tears pitiful whines out of Bucky.

“T-too much,” he grits out, and Steve laughs, the low and dripping satisfaction, and stops stroking but doesn’t take his hand away, keeping it curled over Bucky’s soft cock as he ruts into him with renewed fervor.

Bucky turns his head and opens his mouth for Steve’s. He bites down on a plump lip, and Steve comes inside him with a moan that reverberates down Bucky’s ribs.

Afterwards, they cling to each other and the hardly comfortable tree, not so much catching their breath as shaking off the afterglow, because the middle of the night in some forest isn’t the best place for post-coital romance.

Not that they were big on that in the first place.

“Came in me _again_ ,” Bucky grumbles, pulling his pants up, Steve a lot less useful now that he’s got his rocks off. “You get a fuckin’ kick out of watching me hobble around without come in my underwear, you pervert?”

Steve turns him around and kisses him, the deep, toe-curling kind that shorts out Bucky’s brain.

“It’s how I show my love,” Steve says, completely serious, when they break apart.

“Fuck you,” Bucky says, grinning despite himself. “Love me less messy.”

“Can’t,” Steve says, and he’s smiling too, but there’s nothing joking about his eyes. “Nothing neat and tidy about what I feel for you, Buck. Never was, never will be. Don’t know how not to give you everything I’ve got.”

And it’s not _fair_ that they’re doing this in Fuckwille, Europe, balls-deep in a war that never should have happened. Bucky has always dreamed of the two of them in growing old in Brooklyn, familiar till their last breath.

“Don’t want it any other way,” he tells Steve, not smiling, not joking, framing that big, beautiful face with hands that have always felt inadequate to contain that bright light. “Everything you are, I want it, Steve, till the end of the line.”

-

He spends hours throwing up, gagging on bile and misery long after his stomach has been emptied.

He’s haunted by images, _memories_ , of Steve’s kind blue eyes, and for a fleeting moment, everything’s good and right and true, right before they turn into the Captain’s cold, dead ones.

They’re the same damn eyes.

-

Remembering Steve hurts, but forgetting him hurt more, and Bucky knows Hydra burned his captain out of his mind a long time before the Captain showed up.

The worst pain is not his torture but knowing that they got to Steve, took everything bright and gold and true about him and _broke_ it.

The knowledge burns like hot coal in his sternum, where his heart used to burn with love for Steve, back when he could feel without a thousand bitter aches to warp every pulse of emotion.

The Widow was right, but she was wrong too. It hurts, but Bucky doesn’t regret it.

Hydra does. He makes sure of that, raining down the vengeance he didn’t care to enact before. Steve always brought out the violence in him, not because he was a bad influence. Bucky simply loved him too much; he would have torn the world apart for him, would have bathed in blood to keep that golden boy safe.

There is nothing quite as destructive as love.

-

The files are…informative.

Bucky spends many more days hunched over the toilet until his mind and body becomes accustomed to the atrocities visited on a body he once knew better than his own. Grief and righteous rage dull into grim resignation.

They found the Valkyrie in the 70s. When he woke, Steve remembered little. And what he did remember, they burned out of him.

His first mission was Bucky.

-

The Soldier is sent into the pit with _Freight Car_ still echoing around his skull, sounds stripped of meaning. He doesn’t care about them. He has his orders.

His enemy is a man with the Soldier’s build, dressed head to toe in black, the only splash of color a red star stamped across his chest, a mirror to the one on the Soldier’s left shoulder. There are no weaknesses in the way he holds himself. The upper half of his face is covered in a helmet, leaving only a strong jaw and thin lips visible.

Blue eyes regard the Soldier, bright even through the narrow slits in his helmet.

“Begin,” says the Commander.

They fight.

The Soldier’s opponent does not fold under the metal fist driven into his gut, and the Soldier does not waver when a well-placed kick breaks two of his ribs. They are evenly matched, and they are not told to stop, so they fight even as blood stains the concrete floor in thick swathes and bones break under surging metal and flesh.

“Captain,” the Commander calls, and the Soldier’s opponent barks out an acknowledgment without taking his eyes off the Soldier.

“Catch.”

Something comes sailing through the air. A circular disk slams into the hand the Captain throws out in time to save his neck from its narrow edge.

It’s a shield, pained grey with a blood-red hydra grinning in the middle.

“Continue.”

The stalemate breaks in the blink of an eye.

The Captain wields the shield like a natural extension of his body, and the one time the Soldier wrenches it out of his hand, his use of it is clumsy and graceless. He breaks the Captain’s nose anyway, seconds before the edge of the shield is slammed into his left elbow and his whole body twisted until something gives with an electrical buzz.

It's a quick and painful ride to the end after that.

The Soldier is pinned to the floor with the Captain’s boot at his throat, left arm useless and every finger in his right hand broken. The edge of the shield rests lightly on his thigh, a threat held in check by the Captain’s grip. The Soldier chokes on every breath. The Captain’s eyes are a darker blue.

The Commander applauds.

“Well done, Captain. I told you, did I not, that you will be a glorious asset to Hydra? Now, enough. Let him go.”

The Captain does not move.

“Captain, enough,” the Commander repeats, sharper now. The Captain doesn’t even seem to hear him. “Baranov, separate them.”

A large man in combat gear grabs the Captain’s free arm, the one with a broken thumb. The Captain breaks his neck without removing his boot from the Soldier’s throat.

Pandemonium.

The other guards rush the Captain. The Soldier, freed, scrambles to his feet, body flaring in pain. Someone grabs his right elbow, and the Soldier sees the Commander’s wide, too-white eyes before he retaliates.

“Soldier, get me out of here.”

He reverses their grip, taking the Commander by the arm and dragging him out of what is rapidly turning into a bloody cemetery for many of Hydra’s best and brightest. The Captain, held in check by a swarm of armed guards, cannot get to the Soldier or the Commander, and the men and women swarming him pay the price with their lives.

When the Soldier slams the grilled door shut, the Captain is standing tall amidst a sea of corpses, splattered with blood both his own and not.

With slow deliberation, he unclips his helmet, exposing the upper half of his face. There’s a half-smile quirking his thin lips, but his eyes are cold, intent on the Soldier’s.

“Gas him,” the Commander orders. “Take the Soldier to Morozov. Fix his arm.”

Arms seize the Soldier by the shoulder. The Captain’s stare stays in his mind long after they vanish from his sight.

-

Karpov dies a death quicker than he deserves. Bucky stands over his cooling corpse for a long time, staring at the little red book in his hand.

He opens it much later, barricaded in a hole of an apartment.

_Longing  
Rusted  
Furnace  
Daybreak  
Seventeen  
Benign  
Nine  
Homecoming  
One  
Freight Car_

His heart climbs into his throat with each word, fluttering like a sick bird.

And then–

_Freedom  
Blue  
Miracle  
Midnight  
One  
Shield  
Nine  
Motherland  
Eighteen  
Sacrifice _

Mirrored words. Mirrored minds.

He burns the book.

-

Karpov’s sudden disappearance doesn’t go unnoticed the way Bucky hoped for. He wouldn’t care except for how it puts Tony Stark back on his scent, a bloodhound with a grudge and highly advanced monitoring technology.

Bucky should keep his head down and vanish into some mountain crevice until Stark’s rage has had time to simmer down. It’s a familiar routine by this point.

But he can’t. The need to find Steve is a compulsion, a constant throb in the back of his mind, almost like programming. Bucky doesn’t like that he’s so helpless to resist, but when he thinks of Steve, frozen and alone, he loses the will to try.

He makes it to the facility in Siberia with few complications, uncomfortably aware that he’s running out of time. Stark is on his tail, and it’s only a matter of time before he flies here, and unlike the battles of before, where the possibilities were simple enough, Bucky cannot even begin to predict the outcome of this one.

Steve is there, the first among the tanks that host the other Winter Soldiers, the ones who never saw much action before Hydra’s Russian head collapsed in on itself and the Americans took over.

Bucky activates the tank and sets it to defreeze with shaking fingers. As the fluid drains, he leaves to find Steve clothes.

And weapons.

His body remembers this place better than his mind does. The filthy walls and rusted metal doors bring forth fleeting flashes, but Bucky already knows everything he needs to about what was done here.

He finds the shield first. He hesitates over the dusty black surface. Now that he knows better, the sight of it is revolting. Patriotic red-white-blue seemed ridiculous once upon a dream, but this is sacrilege. Steve would have been horrified to see what it became.

He would have been horrified to see what _he_ became.

Bucky scores metal fingers along the grinning hydra in the middle. He grabs it by the straps and doesn’t look at it as he sets about finding Steve some half-decent gear. It’s easy enough. This place hasn’t seen human touch in over a decade, but Hydra has always been as efficient as it is paranoid.

By the time he returns to the tanks, the fluid is halfway down Steve’s calves and his breathing is noticeably deeper. Bucky watches, heart pounding, as the glass starts to lift, white smoke billowing out, evoking memories too vivid to ignore. Bucky grits his teeth and doesn’t dare take his eyes off the slowly waking man. He doesn’t know who he will see behind those familiar blue eyes, but he knows it won’t be that Brooklyn boy he loved.

Steve’s placid as he steps out of the tank, eyes blank as his body works on autopilot. That, too, is familiar.

Steve quietly dresses in the clothes Bucky gives him and arms himself with the same unthinking efficiency. Maybe it’s a mistake, giving Steve weapons when Bucky doesn’t know whether he will turn on him. He’s not very worried. Hydra learned early on that as fickle as the Captain was despite his programming, he could be kept under control if they dangled the Soldier in front of him like a prize. It always worked, and Bucky no longer wonders why.

Steve was the same, in the streets of Brooklyn and in war-torn Europe, and Bucky used to find his single-minded devotion sweet then, but now–

If God exists, he has a twisted sense of humor.

Steve speaks, and Bucky damn near leaps out of his skin.

“I know you,” he says. And then, “How do I know you?”

A very long time ago, twelve-year-old Bucky Barnes figured out a strategy to get him out of tough situations that made him feel both stupid and ten-feet tall. _When in doubt_ , he chanted to himself, looking a boy two years older in the eye and preparing to get the shit kicked out of him, _act like Steve_.

He meets Steve’s electric blue gaze.

“My name is Bucky Barnes,” he says, “I’m your friend.”

There is no change in Steve’s expression, and Bucky ruthlessly quashes the flare of disappointment. He takes comfort in the fact that the blankness on Steve’s face is no longer the mindless nothingness of sliding free of cryo but the calculated poker face of a wary soldier. And that doesn’t change even when Steve looks at the other tanks and its slumbering inhabitants.

“Are you going to wake them?”

“No,” Bucky says. “I’m here for you.”

Steve moves like quicksilver.

Bucky watches in horrified shock as five neat holes pierce each tank. The bullets don’t stop until they’re buried in the Soldiers’ brains.

Steve tucks his gun away and turns back to Bucky. He takes a step closer, and Bucky steps back before he can think better of it, but he forces himself to hold his ground as Steve continues to approach. His body language is controlled but not hostile. There’s finally some life in his eyes, a spark of interest, maybe curiosity.

“I know you,” he says again, close enough that Bucky can smell the rankness of his breath. “Soldier.”

“My name,” Bucky says, very, very quietly as a broad, gloved palm cups the side of his face and a thumb presses in on his cheekbone, “is Bucky.”

“Bucky,” Steve repeats, displaying no recognition at the name. He tilts his face to the side, hand still deceptively gentle on Bucky’s face. “What’s my name?”

“Steve. You’re Steve.”

Steve just hums, seemingly uninterested despite the question. His eyes burn into Bucky and his touch is electric, thumb sending sparks down Bucky’s spine as Steve traces the contours of his face.

That’s when an all too familiar sound breaks them apart, seconds before Stark’s repulsor blast wrecks the floor where they stood.

“Barnes,” Stark’s oddly hollow voice greets. “I see you made a friend. Won’t save you.”

Bucky learned a long time ago that Stark likes to talk, but with Bucky, at least, he does so _while_ trying to kill him. Static monologues would have been more convenient, but nothing in Bucky’s life is easy these days.

Bucky leaps out of the way of another energy blast. He fights defensively with Stark, uninterested in killing him. He understands why Stark wants him dead, and Bucky’s too much of a survivor to just lie down and die, but if worse comes to worst, he’d rather do that than kill Stark. A pitiful penance, but it’s all he’s got.

Steve has no such compunctions. He and Stark are well-matched, too well-matched, and Bucky never could help himself when it came to Steve.

He wades in, guns blazing, but he’s still not fighting to kill while Stark certainly is, and there’s something poetically fatalistic about the blow that severs his metal arm from his shoulder. The pain’s too great for him to scream. He falls to the floor and watches the arm drop with a sharp clang, exposed circuits sparking pitifully before they die. The fingers that strangled Maria Stark twitch once before they go still.

Stark’s not satisfied. Steve’s furious.

It’s the latter that is surprising, at least for one moment before Bucky’s slightly addled mind realizes that yes, of course this new, broken Steve would be angry that someone else hurt Bucky.

Holding back the way Bucky did, Steve wouldn’t have beaten Stark. Free of moral or emotional constraints, he was easily Stark’s equal. Incandescent with rage and intent on the kill, he’s nigh unstoppable.

Bucky tries, once, to get up and do – something, but between the broken bones and the loss of his dominant limb, he’s effectively incapacitated. Pain is an old, familiar friend but now, that experience is only useful in that he doesn’t pass out from the shock.

He watches from the ground as Steve sinks the edge of his shield into Stark’s arc reactor and lifts it again for a fatal blow.

Stark, he thinks with an odd detachment, should have brought the rest, should have waited. He has no allies here.

Just Bucky.

“Stop.”

It’s barely a rasp, but Steve hears. And miraculously, he stops. He turns his head, narrowed eyes meeting Bucky’s, their blue luminous.

“Don’t kill him. Please.”

Stark’s the only one who makes a noise, audibly shocked by Bucky begging for his sake. Bucky doesn’t look at him, but Steve does, and his expression darkens.

“No! Steve, Steve, please. Stop. It’s over. You won. Please. Let him go.”

Such lines never worked when it was Bucky trapped in Steve’s – the Captain’s – grasp, but Bucky has always been a special case to any and all incarnations of Steve.

Steve throws the shield aside. It clatters to a stop a few feet away from Bucky, who spares a glare for the marred face of the hydra before looking back at Steve, well aware that he needs no weapon to kill. And he does grab Stark by the throat, but he doesn’t crush his windpipe.

“Touch him again,” Steve says, voice low and sharp with the ice of seventy winters, “and I’ll tear your flesh from your bone. He’s _mine_.”

Stark, wisely, says nothing. Or maybe he can’t with Steve’s hand tight around his throat.

“Steve,” Bucky calls. “Come on. We have to go.”

Steve pries his fingers away, and Stark drags in choking breaths. Steve climbs off Stark’s prone form. He’s not gentle when he reaches down with a hand to pull Bucky up, but he lends his considerable strength to Bucky with an unthinking ease that makes his head and his heart both ache.

“Transport?” Steve asks.

“Outside,” Bucky says. He wants to rest his head on Steve’s broad shoulder. He wants to sleep and wake up in a past life. “If he hasn’t blown it up.”

Bucky would have heard that, probably. Sure enough, the jet he stole is right where he left it, all of it intact. It wouldn’t last five minutes in a firefight against the Avengers’ Quinjet, but Stark came alone in his metal suit and that buys them enough time to get the fuck away before someone inevitably comes looking for him.

Steve throws the shield aside and sets Bucky down marginally more carefully once they’re inside. He kneels down, eyes intent on the sheared circle of Bucky’s left bicep.

“We need a replacement,” he says. “And someone who can attach it.”

Bucky closes his eyes. Half of him wishes that his resurfaced memories were a little less useful. It would give him an excuse to pry out the whole thing and let it rot, himself along with it. But he can’t, and he knows he was never really going to.

“Base in Odesa,” he tells Steve. “I don’t know if they’ll have a good tech.”

“We’ll see. Do you need to rest first?”

“Yes.”

Steve hums. Bucky can’t tell whether the sound is disappointed, unimpressed with Bucky’s weakness, but he decides he doesn’t care. He’s done enough for the day. Everything hurts.

“Stay here.”

Steve heads for the cockpit. Bucky doesn’t know whether he imagined the fingers that brushed gently along his temples, and he doesn’t know which answer he prefers.

-

They go to a Hydra safe house. It’s isolated and well-equipped, somewhere they can lie low and lick their wounds, though the latter is mostly for Bucky’s sake. Bucky usually avoids Hydra-owned properties because over half of them were compromised by Sharon Carter’s file-dump and the remaining are more likely than not to be crawling with the scrambling remnants of Hydra. But between the Avengers and other intelligence agencies, the number of active operatives and facilities are a fraction of what it used to be, so it’s less of a risk now.

If nothing else, between him and Steve, they can handle anything other than the full might of the Avengers.

Bucky’s prodding at the ragged stump of his left arm when Steve emerges from the shower in nothing but a towel wrapped around his hips. He holds himself with the easy confidence of a man who knows very well that he can kill ten men even with his balls flopping all over the place.

“Steve,” Bucky says when Steve seems to content to just stand there and stare at Bucky.

Blue eyes narrow at the name. Earlier, Bucky gave Steve the files he gathered on the two of them. Steve read through the whole of them in less than an hour, but his reaction was…less than reassuring.

“Why does it matter?” he asked, putting the files aside with an indifference that was more concerning than anger or disdain would have been. “The past is only another chain.”

Bucky didn’t know what to say then. He still doesn’t.

Steve takes pity on him. He walks towards Bucky, standing in front of him, closer than is strictly polite. He doesn’t seem to have grasped the concept of personal space, or if he has, he has decided that it doesn’t apply to Bucky.

Bucky doesn’t quite know what to make of him. This isn’t the Captain any more than he is that kid from Brooklyn. The man peering down at Bucky with icy blue eyes and an unsmiling mouth is as much of a hybrid as Bucky himself, and while Bucky’s still clawing his way out of seventy years of torture and brainwashing, Steve is fresh from over ten years of cryo, which is the worst of prisons but also the time their abused brains healed. There was a reason Hydra always shoved them straight into the Chair after waking them.

But if Steve remembers their shared past, he doesn’t show any indication of it, and Bucky doesn’t know which is worse, Steve not remembering or Steve remembering but not caring.

A touch on his left shoulder jerks him out of his thoughts. He’s exhausted. He needs rest.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not anymore. The severing did, but I think it also damaged the nerve hookup.”

Steve nods. His hand trails over to Bucky’s chest, splaying featherlight over his ribs. The heat of Steve’s palm seeps into skin even through Bucky’s tank top.

“Other injuries?”

Bucky has to swallow before he can speak.

“Healing.”

Around forty minutes ago, one of his broken ribs popped back into place and made him wince. Steve wasn’t in the room and didn’t see, but there’s still another three left. None of them have punctured his lungs, so Bucky’s content to leave them be. He’s soldiered on through worse.

“Stand up,” Steve orders, taking a small step back. “Strip.”

Bucky obeys without thought, and a small part of his mind is terrified about it, but the rest of him is oddly relieved.

Steve’s fingers hover over the bruises on Bucky’s torso, not touching but threatening to, the potential of it making Bucky’s breath catch. There’s something unsettlingly appealing about Steve pressing sharp nails into the throbbing bruises and making the hurt his own.

The paths Bucky’s mind takes scare him sometimes.

When Steve does touch him, it’s on a patch of unhurt skin. Goosebumps break out all over Bucky’s flesh, and he doesn’t think he’s imagining the keen interest sharpening Steve’s eyes.

“Turn around,” Steve says, and Bucky does.

His back didn’t survive Stark unscathed, but it fared better than his chest. Steve freely trails his hand down the length of Bucky’s spine, and Bucky shudders, full-bodied and _violent_.

“What is it?” Steve asks.

“Nothing,” Bucky gasps, and when the answering silence manages to be distinctly displeased, he chokes out, “I don’t know.”

Steve’s hand slides around him, uncaring, this time, of Bucky’s motley of bruises. Long fingers splay out over his belly, and Steve’s skin is soft, callouses all eaten by his healing sleep in cryo, but the touch still tears a shiver out of Bucky. Steve’s chest presses to his back, slightly damp but _scorching_ , and Bucky doesn’t even recognize the noise that escapes him.

“I’m not even hurting you,” Steve says, and he sounds amused.

Bucky doesn’t know how to tell him that it’s been decades since anyone touched him without violence, years since anyone touched him at all, and–

Oh, that’s it.

“No one’s touched me in a long time,” he says.

Steve’s breath falters, losing its slow, even rhythm. It’s only for a moment, but it’s telling anyway.

“Good,” he says, voice dark with satisfaction. “That’s good.”

His hand presses harder against Bucky’s stomach. His other hand runs gently over Bucky’s hair, then slides down, that huge palm covering his eyes and blocking out the entire world.

Bucky shudders, breathes, the whole of him contained in Steve’s hands.

-

The Odesa base is active, for what it’s worth, but Hydra has been in shambles ever since Insight and this was designed as a support facility to begin with. It stands no chance against the combined might of two Winter Soldiers, even with one of them lacking his most effective weapon.

They do find a competent enough tech and whatever the strength of her loyalty to Hydra, the sea of corpses surrounding her must make a compelling argument. Steve promises her he’ll let her live if she does as told.

And she does.

It hurts.

Some of the remains of the old arm have to be removed, the ports cleaned for attaching the second one. Bucky refuses sedation, and neither Steve not the tech forces him. It takes a little over an hour, and once it’s over, Bucky’s nauseous from the pain and his reflection has bone-white skin.

He walks, slow but balanced, to Steve, who raises his gun.

“Please,” the tech says.

“Steve? Wait, _don’t_ –”

It’s not enough this time. The tech falls down with a neat hole in the middle of her forehead. Bucky doesn’t stagger to his knees, doesn’t vomit, but a part of him wishes he could.

“Steve,” he says again, a sigh this time. “We could have just delivered her to the police.”

Steve spares him a fleeting glance before marching out of the base. Bucky follows him out, eyes fixed on the center of his shield, now a plain black. He remembers thinking, in a time that was barely two week ago but feels like years, that the compulsion to find Steve felt like programming. He knows better now.

Or maybe it is programming, but if it is, then it’s that of Bucky Barnes, not the Winter Soldier.

-

“You’ve gone soft,” Steve says from the doorway.

Bucky doesn’t stop disarming, every motion furious, and when he runs out of weapons to take off his person, he turns to clothes. Steve doesn’t take the motherfucking hint.

“I remember your violence. It was brutal. Beautiful.”

Bucky snaps.

He stalks over and doesn’t stop until he’s nose-to-nose with Steve, not giving a fuck that he’s half-dressed and unarmed and fisting his hands in the collar of a man who might yet decide to put a bullet in his skull as he seems so fucking fond of doing.

Steve blinks at Bucky, unperturbed. That pisses Bucky off more, because this uncaring composure isn’t _Steve_. He was a spitfire from the day he was born.

“That was what they made me into,” Bucky hisses, teeth bared. “And I’m more than that.”

He lets go of Steve and sways back, fisting his hands by his side. Steve watches placidly, an odd quirk to his lips.

“So are you,” he says, a little calmer. 

Finally, Steve reacts.

“Are we?” he asks.

Before Bucky can respond, Steve reaches for him, and it’s instinct to flinch away from the potential violence of those familiar hands, but Steve’s fingers stop short of Bucky’s face, hovering while Steve smiles at him with an edge that makes Bucky wary. But he stays still, silently permitting the touch. It’s gentle, Steve’s broad palms cupping Bucky’s face between them.

And Bucky can’t help the way his breath trembles and body melts.

“How deep does it go, this change?” Steve asks. His hands slide down to Bucky’s shoulder, fingers curving almost delicately over flesh and metal. “Bone deep?”

Steve shoves him down. Bucky falls to his knees without so much as a whimper.

“Shall we see?” Steve asks.

Bucky doesn’t know what to call the tightness in his throat. Resignation, maybe. Or relief. Because it doesn’t matter whether he’s a Brooklyn boy lost at war or Hydra’s favorite gun. He can’t change how Steve runs through his blood like wildfire.

He doesn’t even know if he wants to, and the answer must show on his face.

Steve smiles down at him, a mad god’s benediction.

Bucky doesn’t look away from his eyes as he fumbles with Steve’s fly, undoing the buttons with shaky fingers. Steve’s not hard when Bucky pulls him out, but the heat of his mouth changes that. One of Steve’s hands slide into his hair, undoing the neat bun to let it fall free, easy target for fingers that twist into the strands and grip hard. Bucky moans through his mouthful and gets a cock down his throat for it, Steve pushing deep with a ragged breath.

He takes over, swift and savage, fucking Bucky’s face with a single-minded intensity that makes him choke and burn.

Bucky tries to relax into it, open his throat and let it happen, but it’s been so long and his body has forgotten it must mold itself to pressures of the flesh. Steve seems to enjoy that too, the first sound he lets escape a groan that’s born when Bucky gags on his cockhead, rearing back to cough and sputter. Steve allows him a brief respite, and then he’s pushing past Bucky’s wet, slack lips, making him struggle to swallow around the maddening girth of Steve’s cock. And Bucky lets him, lets it all happen, and he can’t even say why.

His own dick’s heavy between his legs, filling with blood as he drowns in the taste and scent of Steve’s sex.

Bucky whimpers when Steve comes down his throat, swallowing instinctively and gagging on the taste when Steve pulls out before he’s finishing, dribbling his release over Bucky’s tongue and lips. He swallows that too, the taste sharp and bitter but not wholly unpleasant, which is the worst surprise every time.

Steve’s eyes are half-lidded but fixed on Bucky, and though he’s breathing hard, it’s clear he’s more fascinated by a drop of come on Bucky’s lip than basking in his release.

“Up,” Steve says and doesn’t give Bucky time to obey before tugging him up by the hair. Bucky stumbles to his feet with a groan and a curse, and Steve–

Steve kisses him.

He freezes.

Steve Rogers used to kiss him on the regular since they were sixteen and seventeen and figured out they wanted to touch dicks and grow old together. The Captain fucked him, used him, but it was ownership for him, Bucky something that was _his_ in ways the poor bastard didn’t even understand. They never kissed.

It's a clumsy thing. Steve’s all teeth, and Bucky is unmoving, and their lips smash awkwardly together, but then Bucky jerks to life with a gasp, and Steve swipes his tongue along his lips, and somehow, they’re kissing, hungry and a little violent.

They break apart, breathing raggedly into the scant space between their mouths, and there’s a moment of stillness before Steve slams their bodies together and Bucky attacks his mouth with a frenzy of his own.

It ends with Bucky pinned to the wall, Steve’s hand shoving down his briefs. The other one’s still in Bucky’s hair, the grip tugging at the scalp in a way that sends little sparks to Bucky’s cock.

Steve’s not gentle when he wraps his fingers around it. His hand is too try, and Bucky’s wet at the tip but not enough, and it would be the easiest thing to just spit into a palm, but Steve strokes him fast and frantic and on just the wrong side of dry, and all Bucky does is whine and whimper and _let him_. He pants into Steve’s neck, cocooned in the scent of his sweat, and darts his tongue out for a taste when the pleasure-pain becomes overwhelming.

It’s grounding, the sting of Steve’s sweat on his tongue, and Bucky sucks a clumsy bruise while he shakes apart in Steve’s palm.

A too-tight grip at the head, a blunt nail pressing into the gushing slit, and Bucky’s coming, flung over the edge too suddenly for him to even scream. He keens into Steve’s neck and shudders through each, throbbing pulse of his orgasm, knees threatening to give out from under him. But he doesn’t collapse, kept upright by Steve’s body warm against his.

Steve bodily hauls him to bed, and it’s fundamentally unfair that he can even move when anything beyond flopping his limbs and panting is currently beyond Bucky. It’s never like this when he rubs one off, but get Steve’s hands on him and Bucky’s useless after an orgasm.

And Steve, fucked memory or not, has never not taken advantage of that.

Bucky finds himself biting a pillow while thick fingers pry him open. They don’t have anything, Hydra doesn’t exactly stock its safe houses with sex supplies, and if there’s anything in the sturdy little shack that can be used instead, neither Steve nor Bucky has gone looking. Too late now. Steve’s plastered to Bucky’s back, touching him like he wants to fuse their bodies together, and Bucky doesn’t think anything short of enemy action can get him to leave the bed and Bucky in it.

Bucky doesn’t even try, not even when Steve’s cock carves a burning path into his body.

Precome, spit, and sheer persistence doesn’t make for an easy fucking, but when the pain sinks its claws into Bucky’s gut and tugs, it’s not altogether unpleasant.

He cries out, tightening helplessly around Steve. He’s being pried open, split in half, and his dick slowly twitches to life even as the rest of his sweat-soaked body trembles in mingled pain and pleasure.

Steve’s breath falls hot on his nape. He’s curved behind Bucky, their bodies slotting into each other, joined in slick heat. The position is gentler than being on all fours with Steve slamming into him, which is all he remembers from their time as the Soldier and the Captain.

Bit by bit, Bucky’s body loses its tension, and Steve picks up speed, lazy rutting turning into hard, rough grinds that rubs his cock along Bucky’s prostate and sends bolts of sharp sensation all through him. He doesn’t touch his dick, left arm thrown back to wrap desperately around Steve and the other clenched in the sheets. It’s enough, like this, Steve behind him, inside him, moving, always moving, and sweeping Bucky along with him.

Teeth sink into the side of his throat, sudden and _tearing_ , and Bucky comes with a shocked cry.

Steve fucks him through it, grinding deep as Bucky’s cock pulses untouched, and then he’s coming too, filling Bucky with his come even as the taste of it lingers in his mouth. A hot tongue laps up the blood on Bucky’s throat, and Steve’s low hum drips satisfaction.

Bucky breathes raggedly in the aftermath, the situation almost painfully familiar.

Behind him, Steve stretches out his body without moving away from Bucky, who follows suit, grumbling when his asshole stings. Steve holds him more securely around the waist and cuddles up to him. In another life, it would feel sweet. In this one, Steve’s arms are more secure than most prisons, and Bucky knows his fate.

“Mine,” Steve says, murmuring the claim into Bucky’s ear, and he doesn’t sound questioning or triumphant, just quietly confident. He kisses the broken skin where his teeth sank deep. The soft pressure of his lips hurt, but it’s the kind of dull ache that sends pleasant warmth crawling through Bucky’s blood.

“Yeah, Steve,” Bucky says, tired and sad and still feeling safer than he has in years. “Yours.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell at me!


End file.
